


The Alien Irritant Anecdote

by DameRuth



Category: Big Bang Theory, Doctor Who
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-07
Updated: 2010-05-07
Packaged: 2017-10-09 08:33:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/85142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DameRuth/pseuds/DameRuth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's an alien in Leonard and Sheldon's living room, and he's <i>really</i> annoying</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Alien Irritant Anecdote

**Author's Note:**

> As LadyChi commented on my last DW/BBT crossover, over on LJ, yes, I really wanted to have Sheldon and the Doctor meet. So I did. Assume that this takes place sometime during S2 of BBT, before Leonard and Penny are an item. Thanks to Aibhinn for the beta, as so often before! :)

"It's bigger on the inside," Leonard said, tilting his head back to follow the twining coral struts up – and up – and up to the domed ceiling. "_Way_ bigger. Whoa."

Sheldon, standing next to Leonard, sniffed at his roommate's reaction. "You'll have to forgive him," he said in a long-suffering voice, addressing the astonished brown-suited man standing at the top of the ramp; behind the man in brown, a luminous glass column dominated the center of the room. "He's a little slow. _Clearly_ it's bigger on the inside. What _I_ want to know is how you make it all fit."

"Excuse me?" asked the brown-suited man, revealing a British, rather than a Martian accent, to Leonard's surprise. Unless Martians just happened to sound British.

Sheldon gave an eyeroll in his best _I'm surrounded by idiots_ mode. "How does all of this," he waved a hand impatiently around the large room, "fit in here?"

"Err, that's a little complicated," the brown-suited man replied, tugging on his earlobe as he began descending the ramp towards the two physicists.

"Try me," Sheldon said, in the tone of one throwing down a gauntlet.

The brown-suited man rattled off a long string of . . . something that sounded vaguely familiar, pulling Leonard's attention away from the enormous room and its wild array of kludged-up equipment (_it's even crazier than one of Howard's designs, he should be seeing this, he'd love it . . ._) as he tried to make sense of the description.

"Oh, I see. Dimensional transcendence," Sheldon said, sounding enlightened, if not impressed. He glanced around at the glowing equipment and hexagonally-patterned walls. "Inelegant, but effective. I suppose."

"What do you mean, _inelegant_?!" the brown-suited man said, voice squeaking up a register in outrage.

"Lacking in refinement, grace, or good taste," Sheldon clarified helpfully.

"Is he for real?" the brown-suited man asked Leonard, hooking his thumb in Sheldon's direction.

Leonard sighed. "Unfortunately, yes," he said.

The brown-suited man turned to glare at Sheldon. "Who do you think you are, barging in and calling my ship 'inelegant'? Come to that, how'd you get in here in the first place?"

"Um," Leonard stepped forward with a little wave of his hand. "Actually, your . . . um . . ."

"Ship," the brown-suited man confirmed.

"Your ship, uh . . . landed?" Leonard continued.

"Materialized."

"Materialized in our living room. So we kind of thought we'd better check it out," Leonard concluded apologetically.

"What?!" the brown-suited man asked with a huff. "I can't be in your living room. I'm not in _anyone's_ living room." He stomped the rest of the way down the ramp, shoving Leonard and Sheldon aside as he threw the double wooden doors wide and stepped through. . .

. . . Into Leonard and Sheldon's living room.

"Ah," he said, blinking and looking around. "Blimey, I am in your living room."

"Told you," Leonard said with a shrug, following him out.

"That's another thing," Sheldon said, exiting after Leonard. "How did you _materialize_ here? And don't tell me it's complicated. Just cut to the equations."

The brown-suited man opened his mouth, closed it, then asked, "Do you have something I can write on?" He did a slight double take as he noticed Leonard's whiteboard from the corner of his eye. "May I?"

"Sure," Leonard said. There was nothing on the whiteboard he didn't have copied into his notebook, and besides, he was at least ninety-five percent certain he was dreaming anyway.

"Thanks. I'm the Doctor, by the way," the brown-suited man said with a pleasant smile.

"You aren't _the_ Doctor," Sheldon corrected. "Not in this room, anyway."

The Doctor glared at him for a beat, then turned away, grabbed the eraser, and began wiping Leonard's whiteboard clean. "Riii-ii-ght," he said. "Equations."

\--

Half an hour later, and Leonard was kneeling on the couch, his forearms resting on the back, as he watched the Doctor and Sheldon arguing and gesticulating like a pair of lunatics, occasionally pausing to swipe the eraser and/or the dry-erase pen from one another. Leonard had long since gotten lost in terms of exactly what they were arguing about – oh, he caught the gist of it, but he hadn't spent the long hours Sheldon had on the finer points of things like dimensional origami, black hole engineering and quantum teleportation. As far as he'd been concerned, Sheldon had gone right off the deep end with the fringe science sometimes.

_I guess I owe him an apology,_ Leonard thought, glancing over his shoulder at the large, blue, dimensionally transcendent, black-hole-powered box humming quietly in the middle of their apartment. _When I can get a word in edgewise._ He looked back at the two men arguing like there was no tomorrow.

Get past the hair, dress sense and accents, and the two of them were really strikingly similar, at least in terms of height, build, stubbornness, glare intensity, and the way the veins stuck out in their necks as they shouted at each other. Leonard wondered how much he'd miss if he snuck off to the kitchen to microwave a bag of popcorn.

Just then, the Doctor yelled in frustration, "I know all this because I'm an _alien_!"

Leonard decided popcorn could wait.

"Oh, go on," Sheldon said. "Even I do sarcasm better than that."

"No! Really!" the Doctor said, affronted. "I'm not human."

Sheldon glared at him. "Prove it."

Leonard winced. Based on most of the movies he'd seen, that seemed like an invitation for the Doctor to sprout tentacles and/or eat Sheldon's face. Fortunately, the Doctor just glared back. With short, angry movements he rolled up the cuff of his shirt sleeve, then held out his bare wrist.

"Feel the pulse," he said. "Go on." The _I dare you_ was implicit but unmistakable. "Double cardiovascular system, double pulse."

Sheldon wrinkled his nose at the thought of random personal contact, but, clearly gripped by raw curiosity, pressed his fingertips to the Doctor's wrist all the same. After a few seconds, he snorted and said, "Double espresso's what it feels like to _me_."

The Doctor's expressive eyebrows drew down in a thunderous frown as he yanked his wrist away. Judging from his the look on his face, he was about to embark on new and exciting frontiers in cross-species bickering.

_Figures. Sheldon finally meets an alien and immediately succeeds in, well, _alienating_ him,_ Leonard thought, and snickered to himself. _I just wish Raj and Howard were here, we could open up a betting pool over who'll try to make the other's head explode first. My money's on Sheldon._

The familiar rattle of the front doorknob interrupted his train of thought. He turned his head to see who it was, eyebrows going up at the thought that maybe, just this once, his friends were going to show _good_ timing in their arrival. But it was Penny, instead, still in her Cheesecake Factory uniform. He was off the couch and moving to intercept her before his conscious mind had had time to do more than register her identity. Somehow, it seemed like a bad idea to let her walk in on this unprepared.

She was already talking as she walked inside. "God, Leonard, you would not believe the day I've had!"

"Oh, I dunno, I think I might have you beat there," he told her.

She ignored him in favor of doing a startled double-take at the blue box sitting in the middle of the living room. "Leonard!" she said in an accusing voice, "have you been on eBay again?"

"No," he said, shaking his head and looking at the blue box again. "This one is _not_ my fault."

"Wait, who's _that_?" she asked, catching sight of the Doctor. She looked startled, understandably so. New people weren't exactly a common sight in Leonard and Sheldon's rarified – well, all right, pitiful – friend circle.

Her voice cut through the Doctor and Sheldon's concentration, and they broke off in mid-glare and blinked at the new arrival.

The Doctor recovered first. More than recovered, actually; he all but went on point, and Leonard felt invisible, vestigial hackles trying to go up along his spine.

"_Hel_-lo," the Doctor said, all his attention focused on Penny, Sheldon completely abandoned. He stepped forward and extended his hand. "Pleased to meet you; I'm the Doctor."

Penny didn't quite _swoon_, since she stayed on her feet, but she definitely wobbled a little as she gave the Doctor a once-over. Leonard heard a grating noise and realized it was his teeth grinding together.

"Hi," she said, taking his hand. "I'm Penny."

The Doctor grinned and his face lit up in a way that made a sizeable portion of Leonard's back-brain want to punch him. Unfortunately their height difference made the move impractical, and even Leonard knew the effect would be ruined if he went to get a step-stool first.

"Penny," the Doctor said, rolling the name around on his tongue as if it were delicious. "Penny, Penny, Penny, _Pen_-ny. What a brilliant name! So, Penny, would you like to take a trip to the Horsehead Nebula? That's where I was headed before I took a detour to Pasadena."

_Oh, this'll be good,_ Leonard thought, a little smugly. _Here's where she cuts him down to size. Horsehead Nebula my ass . . ._

"Okay," Penny said with a wide, slightly dazed smile. "Horsehead Nebula, moons of Jupiter, downtown Burbank, whatever." She glanced down at her rumpled work uniform. "Just let me go and change. I live across the hall, it'll only take a second."

_Wait, what?!?!_ Leonard couldn't believe what he was hearing.

"You do that," the Doctor purred, and Penny set a new speed record for getting out the door (and given some of the exits she'd made before, that was saying something).

_She . . . he . . . what?_ Leonard's brain sputtered. _What does she see in him? I mean, look at him, he's even skinnier than Sheldon and has no chin!_

He's also really tall, he's wearing a suit, his hair's great and_ he has an accent . . . oh, hell._

The Doctor was looking after Penny and smirking; not smiling, no – _smirking_. The smirk wobbled and melted away when he turned and caught the full force of Leonard's glare.

_Yeah, that's right, you alien creep,_ Leonard thought, crossing his arms belligerently. _Don't think you're gonna reenact_ Earth Girls Are Easy_ with my ~~girlfriend~~ ~~ex-girlfriend~~ neighbor!_

Behind them, Sheldon announced, "_I'm_ going to go get packed."

"What-what?" the Doctor said, momentarily distracted from Leonard. "Packed? What for?"

"I'm coming with you, of course," Sheldon said, already heading for his bedroom.

The Doctor glanced at Leonard in confusion, and now it was Leonard's turn to smirk. This was just perfect.

"Y'know," Leonard said, "you might want to get out of here while the getting's good." He jerked his head in the direction of the blue box in the middle of the room to emphasize his point. "Once he comes back, you're never gonna get rid of him. Trust me."

The Doctor's eyes widened, and he paled under his freckles.

"Better be quick, though," Leonard added, leaning forward conspiratorially. "He keeps a couple bags mostly-packed ahead of time, in case of emergencies. One of the side effects of him being OCD. Did I mention the OCD? He'll be organizing your sock drawer chromatically before you know it, not to mention what he'll do to the rest of your ship." Did aliens _have_ sock drawers? Leonard didn't know, and decided it didn't matter, because the Doctor was clearly taking his point.

"Er. Um. Well, very pleased to have met you, Lemuel . . ." the Doctor said, speaking with increasing speed and extending a cursory hand.

"Leonard," Leonard corrected, grinning in triumph as he shook the Doctor's hand.

"But I really must be going. Give my regrets to everyone else. Cheers!" The last was practically squeaked out as Doctor dropped Leonard's hand and bolted for his box. He slammed the door closed behind him and a few seconds later the light on top of the box began to flash. An appalling grating noise began and the box started to fade from existence. _Sounds like he's got the parking brake on or something,_ Leonard thought, randomly, not that he cared in the slightest; harsh as it was, the noise was music to his ears.

The ship vanished in a rush of displaced air, re-scattering all the magazines and papers Leonard had hastily gathered up after the ship's whirlwind appearance. As the last page fluttered to the ground, Sheldon reappeared from his room carrying two duffel bags, one dangling from each hand as if he was weighing them against one another.

"Leonard!" he called. "Which do you think would be better to take on a spaceship -- the Earthquake Survival bag or the Zombie Apocalypse bag?"

"I don't think it matters," Leonard told him. Trust Sheldon to have been too absorbed in his bag selection process to notice the ruckus of the box dematerializing. "He's gone."

"_Gone_!?" Sheldon repeated in an affronted voice. His head snapped up and he surveyed the now-empty air where the box had been as if he couldn't believe what he was seeing. "But I said I was packing!"

Leonard shrugged. "Maybe he didn't hear you right. He was an alien."

Sheldon huffed in indignation, temporarily speechless.

"It's probably for the best," Leonard said, trying to sound logical and sympathetic at the same time. "After all, the way you two were carrying on, before you knew it one of you would probably have gotten shoved out an airlock."

Sheldon considered. "I suppose," he said in a tone of irritated acceptance as he turned carry his bags back to his bedroom. "But for the record," he shot back over his shoulder, "it wouldn't have been _me_."

 

_A/N, part deux - Once I found out that RTD (via _The Writer's Tale_) had originally planned for Ten to have a S4 companion named Penny (before it was a done deal that Donna was returning), well, that added _extra_ lulz to this scenario. Penny: "the companion that never was" -- how could I resist?_


End file.
